Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Courts - More on "Woman who recorded cops acquitted of felony eavesdropping charges"

Updating this ILB entry from August 25th, the Chicago Sun-Times today has this report of remarks made by Judge Poser during the course of an oral argument yesterday in the case of ACLU v. Alvarez. The headline to today's story is "Judge casts doubt on ACLU challenge to law forbidding audio recording of cops ." Some quotes from the story by Natasha Korecki:

A senior appeals court judge said Tuesday that if Illinois’ eavesdropping law were expanded, gang bangers and “snooping” reporters would run rampant, secretly recording conversations unchecked.

“If you permit the audio recordings, they’ll be a lot more eavesdropping. … There’s going to be a lot of this snooping around by reporters and bloggers,” U.S. 7th Circuit Judge Richard Posner said. “Yes, it’s a bad thing. There is such a thing as privacy.”

Posner, considered one of the most influential jurists on the appeals panel, made his comments Tuesday morning as the Illinois American Civil Liberties Union argued to change current law to make it legal to audio record public officials in public areas.

Right now, it is legal to video record police officials in public areas but it is illegal to audio record them — or anyone else — without their consent, said Illinois ACLU Legal Director Harvey Grossman.

Grossman said the ACLU wants the federal court to issue an injunction preventing the Cook County State’s Attorney from “indicting us when we seek to record the activities and the speech of police officers in public.